Lou Ford (Casey Af fleck), the soft-spoken deputy sheriff in the lazy West Texas burg Central City in the early 1950s, doesn’t carry a gun. But he doesn’t need one, what with his lethal fists.
Early in Brit director Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me,” Lou uses his hands to turn pretty hooker Joyce (Jessica Alba) into a bloody — and very dead — mess.
Sheriff Bob Maples (Tom Bower) had sent Ford to run Joyce out of town because millionaire Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), who seems to own most of Central City, wants the whore out of his son Elmer’s life. (His son is played by Jay R. Ferguson.)
Joyce stands her ground. She calls Lou a “copper” and slaps him around a bit. He returns the favor, using his belt to whip her before they eventually have wild sex. Thus starts a passionate affair, with Lou nightly driving to the shack Joyce inhabits on the outskirts of town for her complimentary favors. Until he kills her, that is, and frames the naive Elmer.
Who would have thought Lou a psychopath? He has a respectable girlfriend, schoolteacher Amy (Kate Hudson), who has every reason to believe Lou will marry her. And he listens to opera and reads Freud.
Even when the district attorney (Simon Baker) and a local union leader (Elias Koteas) begin to doubt Lou’s story, the deputy keeps his cool.
“The Killer Inside Me” is based on Jim Thompson’s pulp novel of the same name. (A 1976 screen version was little seen.) Stanley Kubrick, whose brutal “A Clockwork Orange” is about another psycho, called the 1952 novel “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” High praise indeed.
Raspy-voiced Affleck turns in an amazingly controlled performance as a natural-born killer, with strong backup from the supporting cast.
The period detail is convincing (great old cars!) and the musical soundtrack, from opera to country swing, adds to the seedy charm of this disturbing but very watchable noir.